Irving Isadore Gottesman (December 29, 1930 – June 29, 2016) was an American professor of psychology who devoted most of his career to the study of the genetics of schizophrenia. He wrote 17 books and more than 290 other publications, mostly on schizophrenia and behavioral genetics, and created the first academic program on behavioral genetics in the United States. He won awards such as the Hofheimer Prize for Research, the highest award from the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatric research. Lastly, Gottesman was a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D.
A native of Ohio, Gottesman studied psychology for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, became a faculty member at various universities, and spent most of his career at the University of Virginia and the University of Minnesota. He is known for researching schizophrenia in identical twins to document the contributions of genetics and the family, social, cultural, and economic environment to the onset, progress, and inter-generational transmission of the disorder. Gottesman has worked with researchers to analyze hospital records and conduct follow-up interviews of twins where one or both were schizophrenic. He has also researched the effects of genetics and the environment on human violence and variations in human intelligence. Gottesman and co-researcher James Shields introduced the word epigenetics—the control of genes by biochemical signals modified by the environment from other parts of the genome—to the field of psychiatric genetics.
Gottesman has written and co-written a series of books which summarize his work. These publications include raw data from various studies, their statistical interpretation, and possible conclusions presented with necessary background material. The books also include first-hand accounts of schizophrenic patients and relatives tending to them, giving an insight into jumbled thoughts, the disorder's primary symptom. Gottesman and Shields have built models to explain the cause, transmission, and progression of the disorder, which is controlled by many genes acting in concert with the environment, with no cause sufficient by itself.
Background + Past positions Gottesman has held the following positions: Sherell J Aston Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Virginia; Bernstein Professor of adult psychiatry and senior fellow of department of psychology, medical school, University of Minnesota; Consultant, mental illness & genetics, Office of Technology, 1993–1994; Consultant, National Plan for Schizophrenia, 1988–1989; Institute of med. comt. consultant, Vietnam War Experience Study, 1987–1988; Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA, 1987–1988; Commonwealth professor, University of Virginia, 1985–; Faculty, department of psychiatry, Washington University in St. Louis, 1980–1985; Consultant, National Institute of Mental Health, Washington, 1975–1979, 1992–; Guggenheim fellow, University of Copenhagen, 1972; Training consultant Veterans Administration, Washington, 1968–1985; Professor, department of psychology, University of Minnesota, 1966–1980; Associate professor of psychiatric genetics, department of psychiatry, UNC School of Medicine, 1964–1966; Fellow of psychiatric genetics, Institute of Psychiatry, London, 1963–1964; Lecturer, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, 1960–1963; and Intern, clinical psychology, Veterans Administration Hospital, Minneapolis, 1959–1960. Gottesman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1930, to Bernard and Virginia Gottesman (née Weitzner), who were Hungarian–Romanian Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Miles Standish Elementary and a public school in Cleveland's Shaker Heights. After leaving school, Gottesman joined the United States Navy, where he was given a scholarship and the rank of midshipman, and was assigned to the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He first specialized in physics but changed to psychology, receiving his B.S. degree in 1953.
Gottesman did his graduate work at the University of Minnesota, which then patterned its clinical psychology program on the Boulder model, which emphasized research theory and clinical practice. He joined the graduate program in 1956 after three years with the Navy, supported by the Korean War G.I. Bill. He began investigating personality traits in identical and fraternal twins who had filled out the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). His Ph.D. thesis, submitted to Psychological Monographs, was rejected before a review on the grounds that the nature–nurture issue it addressed had already been settled in favor of nurture. On appeal, the thesis was reviewed and accepted for publication.
Gottesman began his career at Harvard University as a social relations and psychology lecturer. This non-tenure-track position ended after three years. Then he worked with researcher James Shields at the Maudsley–Bethlem hospital complex in London, using its twin registry to analyze traits of identical and fraternal twins at the lab of Eliot Slater, whom Gottesman met in Rome at the Second International Congress on Human Genetics in 1961.Bertelsen 2011, p. 11 After his return to the University of Minnesota in 1966, Gottesman created a program on behavioral genetics, the first in the U.S. In 1972–1973 he received a Guggenheim fellowship to work with K.O. Christiansen in Denmark. In 1980 he left to join the Washington University School of Medicine, then moved to the University of Virginia in 1985, where he started the clinical psychology training program. Gottesman continued visiting London and collaborating with Shields, with whom he co-wrote a series of books.After spending 16 years at the University of Virginia, Gottesman retired from an active role after 41 years of research, but continued research part-time in psychology and psychiatry.
From 2011 till his death, Gottesman was a professor with an endowed chair in adult psychiatry and a senior fellow in psychology at the University of Minnesota; a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Academy of Clinical Psychology, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; a Guggenheim Fellow for 1972–1973 at the University of Copenhagen; an emeritus in psychology with a chair endowment at the University of Virginia; and an honorary fellow at the London Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has advised 35 graduate students, and an annual lecture on behavior and neurogenetics has been established in his name by the University of Virginia. Gottesman was married to Carol Applen, whom he wed on December 23, 1970; they had two sons. Gottesman died June 29, 2016.
Scientific contributions
Studies on schizophrenia and psychopathology
Gottesman first studied the genetics of schizophrenia on a large scale using the Maudsley–Bethlem register of twin admissions for 16 years. Later he worked on psychiatric genetics and genomics. In his Twin Cities MMPI study, part of his Ph.D. thesis, Gottesman found high levels of inheritance in the scales related to schizophrenia, depression, anti-social personality disorder, and social introversion. Genes strongly influenced social introversion and aggressive tendencies. This led to further studies on personality traits of identical twins such as the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart.
Analyzing the results of the Maudsley–Bethlem study, Gottesman and Shields devised the multi-element, polygenic causation model for schizophrenia by modeling schizophrenia diagnoses using the recently introduced liability-threshold model. The book that summarized and expanded on the study, Schizophrenia and Genetics: A Twin Study Vantage Point, argued that schizophrenia is a product of several genes acting together, and introduced the techniques of precise analysis in the field of behavioral genetics.Gottesman and Shields introduced terms such as "reaction ranges/surface", "endophenotype" and "epigenetic puzzle" into the behavioral sciences. The threshold model hypothesized that both genetic and environmental risks combined to produce schizophrenia, and pushed an individual into a diagnosable condition when their influence grew strong enough. The reaction range concept is the idea that the genes and the environment control behavior, but with separate upper and lower limits on the strength of that control in each case, a concept now part of basic psychology. Before the study, the prevailing opinion was that schizophrenia originated from bad parental relationships. The researchers showed identical twins were more likely to either have or not have schizophrenia together, concluding the disorder was the "outcome of a genetically determined developmental predisposition".
The Maudsley–Bethlem study also hypothesized that schizophrenia was caused by a mixture of many small traits working together. These endophenotypes could be used for diagnosis. Endophenotypes have been interpreted as a link between genes and the final behavior, acted on by the environment and chance elements, with biochemical and epigenetic influences changing the genome but not being passed on to children. Molecular-biological studies in genetics have referred to endophenotypes to explain genetic causes of psychopathology. The researchers also examined how schizoids, those with mild, schizophrenia-like personality disorders, were linked to schizophrenics. Gottesman and Shields extended the term to classes of mild psychological disorders in twins and relatives of schizophrenics. The researchers had hypothesized that schizoida in a twin was how a schizophrenia carrier gene, one in a non-schizophrenic still passing on a genetic risk, expressed itself. The twin study did not confirm this.
In the Denmark study, the researchers evaluated the extent to which genes underpin psychopathology. Their twin studies of criminality found that a genetic disposition to poor self-control caused both identical twins to become felons, or to not become felons. They also studied identical twins who were discordant for schizophrenia, where one twin was schizophrenic and the other not, and found children of such twins had equal genetic vulnerability to the disease. A later study in the mid-1980s, resulting in a paper awarded the Kurt Schneider Prize, concluded that children of identical twins were at higher risk than those of fraternal twins, indicating the non-schizophrenic identical twin passed on a latent genetic disposition, even if it had not been expressed through schizoida. The Denmark study introduced the concepts of "unexpressed genotypes"the latent genetic risk, and "epigenetic control"the biochemical regulation of how genes work, into the new field of behavioral genetics.
Studies on delinquency and violence
In a 1989 review of the research on juvenile delinquency and violence, Lisabeth DiLalla and Gottesman found delinquency could be transitory or continuous, and genes contributed more to the continuous type. In 1991 the same authors published a critique of the then-prevalent idea of antisocial behavior being transmitted through generations by child abuse alone in antisocial families. They stated that a review by Cathy Spatz Widom and the studies she cited had missed an element: children maltreated in families might have been targets because their genes might have influenced them into committing antisocial acts and attracting such treatment from parents.